Last year I spent an hour and a half on a hot, cramped coach in Greece as we were transferred from airport to hotel. The bus driver played poor-quality recordings of Greek pop songs from his memory stick. The enervating atmosphere, combined with the chatter, the bus noise and the shrillness and thudding of the music (the only elements of it that were discernible) COULD have had me thinking that all Greek pop music was the same (and shite to boot)...

Pop music on the radio is transmitted with extra compression so that loud and quiet bits are smoothed out. Great if you're in your car doing eighty with all that engine and road noise...a feeling of sameyness is thereby injected into the music. If I'm on the motorway, I find I can't listen to Penguin Eggs or Mozart piano sonatas on CD because the wide dynamic range means I either miss the quiet bits or turn the volume up extremely loud...

For a number of years I've been editing pop music tracks on my laptop for a local dance teacher, generally by cutting bits out and splicing and blending bits together. I obviously have to listen very closely to the music in order to do that, often having to play passages over and over again to get it right. I've done several hundred songs like that by now. Many an earworm has been the upshot. Pop music hasn't been "my thing" since the Beatles split up but I'll tell you what: in terms of invention, imaginative arrangement, lyricism and production values, there's some bloody good stuff out there. And there's variety. Of course, being a woman of good taste and exceptional talent, the dance teacher has probably selected mostly "better" pop songs... You can have music, any music, playing in the background, but if you're not engaging with it there's the danger that it will rankle and "sound all the same." Engage with it and you're likely to discover that variety and nuance. There may be many common elements in pop music, but, as Dick Greenhaus said seven years ago, if there weren't it wouldn't be a genre. You still might not like it even if you do try to engage, but at least you opened your mind...

I still haven't bought any Greek pop CDs and am unlikely to indulge. End of random musings....